Taking Down Taibbi

Matt Taibbi's recent anti-Romney screed published by Rolling Stone magazine entitled "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital" has been the talk of the left-wing media, from the DailyKos and Huffington Post websites to MSNBC. It has also caught the attention of Business Insider, which says that the article "has tongues wagging. And for good reason."

Taibbi paints a picture of Romney and Bain Capital as ruthless mobsters, or (though he doesn't use this metaphor himself) as vampires who swoop in on unsuspecting companies, bribe the management to destroy the lives of their employees, saddle the company with debt, and then fly away with incisors dripping and bank accounts brimming as the company's life-blood drains away. It is an image that is far more surreal than real, but with just enough of a microscopic grain of truth to convince those with little understanding of finance and investing -- and helped along by a pre-existing bias against people involved in that field -- that Romney's world, and thus Romney himself, is to be feared.

For those of us who have even a modicum of experience in the world of private equity investing, Taibbi's article is a caricature that would be laughable if it weren't so angry, vicious, misleading -- and, unfortunately, accepted as at least plausible by many Americans whose personal experience doesn't allow them to recognize it for what it is: ignorant twaddle little different from the mindset of the Cuban murderer Che Guevara who wrote that "In capitalist society individuals are controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond their comprehension."

Normally I would rather have a root canal than read Taibbi's radical ramblings -- after all, I can hear the same siren song of ignorance and class warfare by watching Obama campaign videos --but his tirade demands a response because, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, it includes much that so many liberals know but which isn't so.